


An dem Fenster starren Gespenster...

by Farrowe



Category: Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Flashbacks, Friendship/Love, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 21:29:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1873137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farrowe/pseuds/Farrowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They died as heroes, leaving Marius with their ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An dem Fenster starren Gespenster...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [schattentaenzer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/schattentaenzer/gifts).



> a birthday present for schattentaenzer on tumblr. heavily inspired by the german-language production in magdeburg.

How the barricades of freedom fell, Marius does not know. Once the sound of the ailing people pierced his heart with flames; once he was swept away on a crimson wave of hope, and it pounded through him with the potency of lifeblood. Once, in a night, the song faded, and the dream bled out, forgotten in the wash of the next rains.

_It had been a libation to Liberty; the wine an offering to Friendship. Both had gone unanswered._

Sometimes, in the night, he still jolts awake, thrust from his dreams by the icy floes trickling along his neck through his hair in a chilling sweat. It is rain left over from the storms, storms that gather and strike ceaselessly at his thoughts when he is vulnerable: in dreams, in reveries, sometimes in the open, when he gives an address in court, and fixes his eye upon a man at the block, who glances back with a glitter that once belonged to different eyes.

His vision swims with the memory of that look, blazing with sharp, cold fire.

_Enjolras! he screamed._

Sometimes, alone in the street, he is transported back, back, back to the barricade, where the noises of guns and men torment him; where hope for a free France burns still, scarlet and steadfast, flying in the wind like a banner of blood. The moon shows his face sometimes in the night, through the holes in the warm blanket it spreads across the evening sky, when the quiet and the smoke have settled, and in the gloom, Marius is cradling in agony a silent, unmoving weight, a rose blooming with blood.

_Rain will make the flowers grow, said his friend, but no weeping would call her back from the earth._

Sometimes soft, white arms embrace him when he sleeps, and the warm caress of breath murmurs in the crook of his neck. His eyes close, but he does not dream, for that gentle touch cannot coax away the echoing shots in the night, or give succour for the cries of men and horses as the rain patters and paints a deep red shine upon the streets, where the stars were once silver in the stones, and now through the window paint black shadows against the window pane. He is lost in that silver night of rain, when light, like soldiers, is born and swallowed by smoke with a single shattering shout, and the strike of midnight is smothered beneath the smoke and the screams and the horrible crack of bodies, as men are cast from their precious tower of freedom, and back into the bosom of the streets.

_Courfeyrac. He choked the name: his lips traced not a sound, but rather the shadows of a warm voice, of the silhouette still faintly visible in the afternoon light, of laughter, of nighttime comforts when the floor had been bare._

And in the days they do not haunt him, the question lingers. Cosette sees it sometimes, in the curve of his shoulder, or in the shadows in his cheeks, somehow sharper than usual in a mirror; and opens her mouth to ask: are you well? What is the matter?

He cannot answer: she does not know who was there beside him on their wedding-day, whose faces were beaming on them in the ballroom, what ghosts were there in the places where their guests stood. By asking she has killed the words that hover still on his trembling lips. Behind them lie still the vacant spectres of bright flames and bright laughter, and a sacrifice on the altar of Liberty.

Dark silence haunts the tables now and for ever, where no friend remains to Marius but the ghosts behind his eyes.


End file.
